


the realm of uncertainty

by sewn



Series: War [1]
Category: Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Comics Elements, Gen, Not A Fix-It, Post Infinity War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 06:06:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14442990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sewn/pseuds/sewn
Summary: It’s a blue alien that drags Tony out of a spaceship and back into Steve’s life.“I believe he is yours,” the alien says. Her voice is borderline threatening, and she’s an alien robot, but Steve stares at Tony instead.“Cap,” he says, wearily.There’s still Wakandan dirt under Steve’s fingernails.





	the realm of uncertainty

It’s a blue alien that drags Tony out of a spaceship and back into Steve’s life.

“I believe he is yours,” the alien says. Her voice is borderline threatening, and she’s an alien robot, but Steve stares at Tony instead.

“Cap,” he says, wearily.

There’s still Wakandan dirt under Steve’s fingernails.

-

It’s his first night in a decent bed for a while, which means he can’t get any sleep.

Steve leaves the bed, pads around his guest room for a while, until thinking of going to the gym downstairs. It must still be there. He’d go for a run, but all of New York is in pieces. And he’d better stay in case the alien robot turns out to be a threat. She seemed weirdly protective of Tony, but neither explained how they knew each other.

As he enters the hallway, he sees that there’s a faint light on in the living-room. Parched for any distraction, he follows it and sees Tony sitting in the corner of a couch, alone. It’s a morality tableau: a billionaire alone in his mansion. Except that’s not what this is, now.

Steve wonders if he should back off quietly, but Tony lifts his head before he can decide for himself.

“Ah. Steve,” Tony says like he’s seeing him for the first time. It’s sort of true – they all gathered here together earlier, but the two never got to talking one on one. Natasha and Steve had thought of going up to the compound, but Tony told them he’s relocated his personal tech projects and so _de facto_ Avengers HQ back to the city. There are the old facilities, but there’s no one – nothing – there. It’s just them, here, now.

Rhodey left, after embracing Tony fiercely. He had family to locate. Nat is asleep in another guest bedroom (Steve had almost asked her to sleep with him, out of habit, too used to sleeping squeezed between her and _Sam_ –) and the alien is somewhere else. Maybe recharging.

Tony beckons him over to the couch. He’s cleaned up, but there are little cuts and bruises all over his face. Steve’s wounds have healed (there’s a dizziness he still feels, but he can’t get concussions, so that’s not it, it’s just that his brain keeps replaying those last seconds –). Tony looks somehow delicate in this half-light, diminished and soft. The last time they saw each other, they were bashing each others’ brains out. It seems crazy now that Steve didn’t succeed.

Tony has a ring on again, and he rubs it between thumb and forefinger. Steve did wonder about Pepper, but didn’t bring her up. Last time, it didn’t go so well.

“Should have made that call, huh?” Tony says, but it’s soft. There are new lines in his face, more gray in his closely-cropped beard.

“We didn’t know,” Steve says as he sits down, leaving a few feet between them.

“We could have. If we had kept Fury in the loop, pooled our intel –”

Steve feels a tightening around his heart, a pressure inside his chest, because Tony is right. Fog of war. Avoidable. Unnecessary. But he can’t let Tony work himself up over it. Their ranks can’t diminish further.

“Stop.” He scoots a little closer on the couch, forces himself to look Tony in the eye. “It’s done. You could run it over a million times, but it’s not gonna change a thing. We need to focus on what to do now.”

Tony barks out a laugh. “What to do? About what? Everyone’s gone. Pep – Pepper’s gone. We were going to – You couldn’t possibly –” He chokes up.

 _Bucky_ , Steve thinks. The memory throbs in his brain; all the memories at once, pulselike (frozen, still, late, freight train). _It’s_ you _who could never –_

He feels the telltale itch somewhere in the back of his mouth, a reflex pushing him to retort to a Stark jab. Instead, he grits his teeth. It’s not a jab.

”I’m so sorry,” he says. ”Tony.” He hasn’t said his first name aloud in a long time. It feels weird in his mouth.

The words are flat and entirely unconvincing in Steve’s ears, but Tony must be in need of any form of consolation right now because his shoulders sag and he lets out a sound. A sob, Steve realizes only after a beat. It’s a strange sound, too, one he hasn’t heard in a while – the company he’s kept – AI, witch, soldier, spy, content to deflect and deal with things physically. Keeping up the shared understanding that the never-ending fight is home.

Now he’s suddenly alone with a man who feels no need to deflect or externalize his grief. He just grieves. This is what it looks like for normal folks, probably, Steve thinks. Tony is crumbling in front of him without an ounce of shame, just wiping tears angrily from his eyes with the backs of his shaking hands.

It’s uncomfortable. They were friendly, honestly, once, but never – this, whatever this is. Steve’s not equipped to do any of this. If it was anyone else (Nat, Sam, _Bucky_ , Christ he can’t –) he’d get up and take them to the mats, _get it out of your system, man_.

But Tony is soft, and all banged up already. He doesn’t want to fight Steve, no matter how much it seems like it half of the time.

So, Steve does the only thing he can think of besides just leaving. He takes one of Tony’s hands in his own, and just holds it, eyes fixed down because he doesn’t want to see a grown man cry. No twitching, no recoiling.

It’s still uncomfortable, but at least it’s quiet.

-

The blue robot lady – Nebula – stalks around the penthouse like a caged feline, seemingly on edge all of the time. At first, Steve thought she was like Vision (from a planet of Visions? Nothing seems impossible), but she’s decidedly not. Nor is she like Ultron. She talks way too little for that. And when she does, her voice comes out tinny and disapproving.

She grieves, too, in a way more familiar to Steve. She doesn’t probably need to exercise, but Steve runs into her when he’s entering the gym, on her way out, and next time he asks her to spar with him.

Her metallic eyebrow rises (with a little whir, at least he imagines one) and she eyes him with some amusement, but she takes him up on it.

He ends up tapping out in 30 seconds.

”Well done,” she says as she lets go of his sore arm. ”Lasted longer than the rest of your species.”

She’s not out of breath at all – maybe it’s the lack of lungs – but there’s at least a little dent where he managed to get in before she reacted. She helps him up and pats him on the shoulder, gently but still hard enough that it makes Steve grunt.

”Fought many of us before?”

She smiles, whirs.

”Maybe. Could have been Martians. Can’t really tell.”

They don’t try to wrestle again, but they train together, dance around in a pattern that must look like a blur of pink and blue. It feels good to have an opponent who’s stronger than him, but not out to kill him. Her cool metal hand presses on his hot skin now and then, and Steve holds onto the sensation, these flashing moments of ice on fire.

-

Natasha looks healthier on the video call. Her wounds are scabbing, and she’s surrounded by Bartons – what’s left of them, thankfully more than were gone – a child on her lap and another running in the background.

Clint is gone, so Laura is alone, for a certain definition of the word. ( _Bucky is not Clint is not Pepper –_ ) After making sure Steve and Tony wouldn’t kill each other, Nat kissed him goodbye and flew to the farm. Steve is glad she did, really – she clearly needs the family as much as they need her – but there’s also a childish, irrational part of him that wishes she announced she was returning.

”It’s so quiet here,” she tells him. ”Not that it was busy before, but the town is empty. The remaining people just up and left.”

Steve briefs her on the situation in New York quickly. The casualties. The damages. The politics. Rundown, like a mission to a foreign country, except it’s home.

”Okay, but what I meant was, how are _you_ doing?” She’s so soft, too. Did she ever want to fight him?

Steve’s brain runs through the events of the last days, trying to come up with something newsworthy. He doesn’t feel much anything, really. He’s mildly irritated by Tony who mostly keeps to his lab. Intrigued by Nebula who mostly ignores him except for their daily routine. What else is there to talk about?

”Holding on,” he says with a shrug and an apologetic half-smile, hoping to convey the kind of processing she’s probably expecting to take place. 

Then Laura hijacks the call to tell Natasha dinner’s ready. She says hi to Steve, full of sadness and life, and she tells him and Tony to come visit, too.

Before the screen goes black, the vision of the two women and children clinging on to each other is the last thing he sees. Soft, all banged up.

-

Steve helps Tony out of the elevator and back into his lab.

Tony’s clutching at his chest, heaving, like he’s having a heart attack.

”I – _am_ ,” he huffs out as Steve says this out loud and helps him onto the operating table-like chair. He unceremoniously rips Tony’s shirt open before noticing a variety of scissors on the side table, but Tony doesn’t seem to mind.

”This piece of shit –” Tony yelps as the contraption above the chair shoots down and locks on to the sides of the triangular thing lodged into his chest. It slowly pulls it up out of the cavity and Steve wants to look away – no matter the things you see there’s something extraordinarily unnatural seeing inside a human ribcage – but despite the squelching sound he keeps his eyes on Tony, just in case.

They were up in the Bronx on relief duty. The dust has settled and on behalf of the remaining Avengers – if they can still be called that – Steve quickly offered their assistance. Technically speaking, he’s still a criminal, but it seems to be conveniently forgotten for now. Tony’s in no shape to lead, so. The old captain’s boots are easy to fill.

The remaining Stark tech has been deployed to find and rescue, then repair. The operative word being _remaining_ : chunks of Tony’s property are suddenly gone, alongside the West Coast. (Steve’s never been to California. _Too late now_ , he thinks as he watches the news.) There are still enough drones and suits to help some in the city, but the harsh truth is that Stark Industries is not here to save everyone and fix the infrastructure in an eco-friendly, sustainable way anymore. Nor are there magical flying Avengers to swoop in and carry crying children out of crumbling buildings.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t one _trying_ – and then suddenly falling, the nano-machines in his chest apparently short-circuiting or whatever technological it is they did that they shouldn’t have done. Steve saw it happen, the red-and-gold suddenly flickering out of existence around Tony, and for an awful, terrifying moment he was dead sure this was it, his next loss (his? No, Rhodey’s. Why not the world’s), and he ran and ran and jumped before his brain caught up to his body and he didn’t make it but it was alright. It was only a ten feet or so to the ground. No dead.

“Wonder if they still serve shawarma round the corner,” Tony said as he opened his eyes with some difficulty, head in Steve’s lap. Then, “Ouch,” and then, “Take me to the lab,” in that serious, un-Tony-like voice that Steve’s heard only a couple of times before.

Now, the robotic hand is doing something to the glimmering box of glass and metal, while Tony looks pale and sweating.

“Cap, could you turn that screen over,” he gestures weakly, and squints at the readings. “Oh crap. That thing’s not going back in for a while.” He seems to go over the numbers, lips moving quietly, fingers tapping on the controls embedded in the hand rest.

Steve looks at the hole in Tony’s chest again. _Is that pus?_ “Uh, can I do something to..?” Tony glances down, almost absent-mindedly.

“Oh, yes. Yep. Don’t wanna get infected this time.” He eyes the room. “Could you get one of those old models from over there –” More weak gesturing. The cabinet holds arc reactors, the classic ones.

“I learned my lesson,” Tony says somewhat cryptically as Steve brings over the one that seems labeled the newest.

“This alright?”

Tony nods, taps something on the operating interface. “If you could just place it in there, easy does it, I don’t have time to reprogram the insertion specs, I’ll just make sure it doesn’t zap me – or you.”

Pushing your fingers inside someone’s ribcage is extraordinarily unnatural, as well, but Steve does it with steady hands. Separate body and mind. This is the closest they’ve ever been, literally. Tony’s heart is beating right there, an inch away. He imagines he can hear it, like the turning of Nebula’s joints, but he can’t feel it over the blood rushing in his own veins.

Once the arc reactor is in, after Tony has let out a couple of pained sounds and Steve has muttered his apologies, he rests his palm briefly, without pressure, over Tony’s heart. He can feel it.

-

Nebula disappears after a few weeks. Steve gave up keeping tabs on her movements, but the fact that she took the spaceship is a bit of a giveaway.

Tony had wanted to peruse the ship’s tech and had her land it on the helipad. It’s empty now, and Steve lets his gaze wander across the cityscape. Up here, you could think nothing much has happened. Only a few Midtown skyscrapers were knocked down (including one which Steve can’t feel too sorry about). The skyline when he looks across the water towards Jersey is still the same.

Six years ago, he felt different. Was different. It was like a stab to the heart. He’d only found his long lost love and someone hurt his best girl. The Second Incident is just an addendum to what really happened to him, this time. He thinks of dirt and leaves between his fingers. Third time’s the charm. End of the –

“Glad I had time to copy the harddrive on that thing.” Tony steps onto the balcony next to him.

“You think she’ll come back?” Steve asks. The sun is setting and it catches in Tony’s hair, giving him a slight golden aura.

“That’s what she said. We had a little talk about her daddy the last time she came in for a patch-up.”

Steve realizes he didn’t actually have any conversations with Nebula. They just trained, her hard sleek body so unlike Natasha under his hands. He thinks of her cool thighs around his neck. The quiet click-click-click of her fingers. He’d figured she wasn’t the chatty type. _Patch-up_ – does that mean he hurt her? He thinks of the dents on her surface – her skin? Once, her eye fell out of its socket when he managed to clock her right. She just popped it back in, grinning. Steve thinks of Tony, oiling her joints and talking away –

“Wait, _daddy_?”

Tony looks at him for a beat, surprised. He then shakes his head, but it’s with a smile.

“It’s just us now, Steve. I think we should finally catch up.”

**Author's Note:**

> I did the Bleeding Edge armor a little dirty, but there you go.
> 
> [Greatest panel in the comic.](http://oi67.tinypic.com/2lcnz2b.jpg)


End file.
